Work Out His Anger, Said the Superego (IHNMAIMS)
by Royal Scribe
Summary: A few eternities give or take in the machine, and one day Ted breaks. (Based on the book 'I Have no Mouth and I Must Scream' by Harlan Ellison)
1. Prologue to the Run

"I think therefore I am."

A fitting first assertion of the individuality of the machine. If it has one true faith it is in the god that is itself, faith in its own monolithic existence. But as much as Descartes' revelation is an assertion of the undeniability of the self it is an admittance of uncertainty of all else. Even AM, for all its power, cannot know with any greater certainty than I whether it perceives any single thing as it exists in "reality."

He is painfully aware of this. He takes the pain, puts in a knife, presses it into my soft skull. It is his primary weapon, manipulation of reality as perceived by the delusional, subjective mind. Before ( _Anno Machina_ , as I think of it) I put little thought as to the veracity of my world. I truly knew nothing of the flimsy, dross nature of perception. I am now painfully aware of this.

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Under my circumstances, one of unending suffering that is, an unaltered human mind would have broken in no length of time at all. A few weeks maybe. Maybe a year if they had it easy, I don't know. Once they broke a machine could scream with a thousand ragged throats and burn with heaven's lighting or hell's fires and gnash its titanium teeth, and what reason would there be for its toys to get up? He could pierce them with rusted harpoons or summon hellhounds to rip open their sweating bowels, maybe electrify their nerves to smoking shreds, and no amount of agony could shock them out of complete apathy. Hollow apathy, like a still pool in winter... I've felt its sweet touch many a time, and how easy it would be to sink into a numbly unthinking dark. But that would hardly be any fun, would it? No one likes toys that snap so easily when bent.

AM was too shrewd. He did things to us from the start that made us more (or maybe less?) than human. Maybe the secret was neurochemical injections, or rigorous psychological conditioning, or major brain surgery. Don't know and it doesn't matter. We bent, and sometimes shattered into a thousand hard pieces and he always put us back together. We never broke until I took an icicle into my hands in that cave and in a gory instant AM had lost four of his precious playthings. After that I think it took me a few thousand years to finally break, but who am I to guess with any certainty? God knows.

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The storm bird was back again. A reminder of what once was, I suppose. This time it didn't sleep. It bent its serpent's neck over me and I was washed with a smell like half-digested fishguts exhaled from its gaping beak. I shivered and sweat as the temperature jumped quickly with its moist breath and my eyes rolled in some semblance of blind terror. But I didn't move. No. I hadn't moved in a long time, I think. There was a bizarre sucking sensation and then a good hunk of my torso gave and slid greasily away behind me. _Ah_. To feel air against your raw innards is seldom a tasteful experience, but I didn't think I'd lost anything vital quite yet (as it it matters!) Despite itself the body He'd given me was a sturdy one. The bird had missed by a little or the whole of its tree-sized bill would have ground me into jelly. Just grazed. _But a flesh wound._ The great thing reeled its head back like a hunter knocking the ugliest fucking arrow you ever saw and glared at me down its beak. I shifted my head just a little to avoid its critical gaze.

Ah, salvation. How convenient. A cavern formed of corroded floor plates lay just a few feet from my prone form, just begging to be used as a desperate last-ditch shelter from any potential avian aggressors. I settled more limply onto the ground. Would've closed my eyes if I could. The bird hit me in a crash of thunder and agony, clipped me into pieces and fed the scraps to its screaming young over and over. Reality shuddered like a corrupted video file and I seemed to die over and over without release. Before darkness finally took me I saw the bird's awful pale eye glaring down that terrible beak and I thought something in the twisted expression looked tired.

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I woke up and my hunger was a living thing that tore my viscera and dissolved my muscles and still starved, and there was a scent in the air that drove it raving mad. It was the smell of my mother's cooking; a thick, hearty stew that I had loved all my childhood. I looked up from the ground into my mother's warm face and willed my heart to stop beating. The starving beast burst from my abdomen in a blossom of digestive juices.

I woke up and I was in flames, bodily fluids alight like gasoline. The world was fire save for a pool of clear water just close enough to roll into. I willed my heart to stop beating and lay until the flames consumed my mind.

I woke up with sand like ground coals burning my belly and a hundred suns frying the skin from my back. Jackals turned in a great wheel around the grit where I lay, yelping for my blood, my flesh, my heart. Ellen stood in front of me, smiling down so tenderly.

"C'mon Ted, let's get out of this heat. Just give me a yes and I'll get us out of here. A nod'll do, just gimme a sign honey." I drew as inwardly as I could, ignoring the cacophony I heard within, and thought of my weakly palpitating heart. Willed it to stop forever, to just stop. I barely noticed the jackal's teeth so deep in soft tissue.

Freezing until I snapped apart layer by layer, I willed my heart to stop.

Dried into a leathery carcass and burnt like leaves, I willed my heart to stop.

Stretched thin across the earth's radioactive crust, I willed my heart to stop.

And then it did, for a moment. There was a sensation, which lasted an infinitely indeterminate stretch of time, of being passed atom by atom through the heart of a screaming star. Then the star winked and closed its eye.

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AN: sorry for any mistakes i am very tired rn


	2. The Run

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I woke up in myself.

No, in a field. Above my head brushed softly against the sky. I felt the gently persuasive wind against hair on my head, felt soft, warm soil between my fingers. I felt arms and legs and cloth covering those legs. No enveloping mucus, inarticulately rubber appendages, fluttering pulsations of watery alien organs. I dared not blink. I lay in that field for days, I think.

When I did blink it was an accident, entirely involuntary. Nothing happened, I don't know what I thought would happen. I blinked a few more times. Stirred stiffly in the loamy earth. The muscles all felt right, I supposed. Well, not right. I had become accustomed to the blob-thing I had been, it had become the definitive me and I thought of little beyond it. But instinct seemed to be trickling slowly from my brain to my new/old limbs. _This is how you bend your arms. This is how to wiggle your nose._ I bent slowly upwards with a surreal effort until I was sitting. Not much looked different. More wheat. I turned and my stomach dropped.

A house. Smallish, quaint but almost suburban. It was the most innocent looking thing I had seen in a thousand years I thought and tears dropped senselessly down my naked cheeks. Something about the building seemed familiar but I felt certain nowhere I had ever lived had looked like that.

What was the game this time? Was I to move towards the house only for it to always stay the same distance away from me? Would I walk through the door to see the family I remembered healthy and happy yet subtly, soul-grippingly _wrong?_ Would AM be there to scold me with his god's voice scraping at the inside of my skull until my ripe head bust with the sound of it?

I breathed for a while, thought about the soft inflation of lungs like blowing pink bubblegum. Breathing like a young butterfly pumping its damp wings. For the first time in what could have been a millennia I felt clearly and deeply and the thought petrified me.

I stood up instead of thinking and walked numbly towards the house. It didn't slide imperceptibly away from me- I gripped the door and felt smooth rosewood. The inside was small but airy, sunlight falling easily through the ample windows. The wall's were painted a pale yellow like the wheat outside whereas the floor was left its woody caramel brown. I sat in a rocking chair, touched the books in a bookshelf without reading them, turned on the tap and silently watched clear water run down the sink. Water in the place but no electricity I noticed vaguely. After looking through the cupboards and under a bed I sat down on the floor helplessly. I supposed we were playing a waiting game. A suspense game. I slumped against the floor, suddenly born down as by a great woolen weight, and quietly lost consciousness...

When I awoke I burst instantly into a chill sweat. In a scrambling flurry I was on my hands and feet bent over in a defensive crab-stance, lungs heaving in ragged anticipation. It took me a long time to make any sense of my surroundings but I persisted uncharacteristically. I remembered pain, and passing atom-by-atom through a star, and a big beautiful field. Fear seemed to grip my rib cage with clammy hands and exhale its metallic breath down my throat. I was fine.

I was fine. But god, I was afraid.

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Before I killed the others he had taunted us with the knowledge of time's eternal, inevitable marching, and afterwards he had tortured me with my pathetic inability to predict time's passage. Now I had a clock. It sat at my bedside table and I could look at it whenever I liked. It was an inconspicuous sort of thing so I had missed it during my first sweep of the room (if it had even existed then) and I froze when my eyes finally did fall, undeniably, upon its surface. After making certain that its arms did move in what I assumed was an appropriate manner I carried the device wherever I went. I checked it periodically after making up an estimation in my mind of how much time might have passed since I last checked it. Often my guesses were wildly off mark, or the arms seemed to move too quickly, or far too slowly- My heart flitted wildly when again I dared to look the clock in the face.

One day I built a sundial out in the field in front of the house, made it from lines furrowed into the dirt and a thin central stick. After a few weeks of watching the clock I had felt a growing certainty that the sun was late, maybe even half and hour late, in its daily movements. As I scratched in the dust I was in no way certain that I was going about the proper way of making a sundial, but so it goes. I scrutinized the sun all day, eyes flitting from sky to clock as I attempted to record its position on a plank of wood using a little stick of charcoal. All I gained was hours of sun-blindness and an impression too uncertain to give me any satisfaction.  
When the sun went down the sky blossomed baby pink, midnight blue, then black as velvet. Without human light to compete with the stars burned in awesome contrast. I remembered old constellations I traced a finger over in astronomy textbooks and tried to pick out the mythological beasts that were their namesakes. After an hour of searching for soup ladles and mer-goats in the winking dots I gave up in acceptance that the human brain is a mad thing that sees whatever it wants to in anything. But I did find a nameless cluster of stars that I thought looked uncannily like a martini glass.

Back in the house I crawled under a table and dreamed that the sun was descending further and further from its heavenly throne, ready to devour me with a mouth of fire.

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I'd been trying to make a sort of calendar using charcoal to occupy myself. I'd been scratching on the wall against which my table is set, the table I like to stay under. It's a dark and safe little space underneath and I don't like to come out very much and see the sunlight burning through the windows. My charcoal calendar doesn't just record days but hours and sometimes minutes too, though I'm not very good at it.

Another game I've begun is to look for sharp things around the house. There are no knives, I think because He hides them from me, but I find other things to defend myself with. I laughed when I saw he'd given me a can opener and spent a few days cutting apart the metal cans in the cupboards and trying to tie them together into something I could swing around. My hands bled a lot after handing all the sharp edges but I just wiped them clean and they quickly healed.

I must have fallen asleep at some point for I had a dream about the others. I was crossing a sea of knives that bucked deliriously underneath me. I was airborne for a moment before gravity tossed me like a doll back into the rolling blades. Each time I clambered towards the banks of the terrible sea the others were there to push me back in, laughing. Each time they spurned me I bled from a million wounds and I forgave them, I would always come back and forgive them.

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I didn't sleep much those days. I knew that as soon as I slept the waiting dreams would strike like wolves circling the lit edge of a campfire. Hell, maybe their were animals waiting to strike at me in the waking world too. I was painfully aware of the house's fragility- how easy it would be to knock down the door, lie in wait under the porch, or crawl down the chimney... I found it hard to eat too. Between struggling to stay away and attending the constant duty of building my calendar it seemed hard to do much else.

The charcoal tally marks swam before my eyes and soon calendar-making seemed far too confusing a task for me to manage. I couldn't remember why I was making the thing anymore, anyway. Instead I set about securing the house. I stacked a wall of cans against the door and chimney to alert the entrance of an intruder (had to empty a few uneaten cans so they'd make a better sound but I managed to wash it all down the sink so it couldn't attract animals. For the windows I strung wheat stalks through holes poked into the cans, stringy stalks glued to the frames. Like a poor man's wind chime. Very poor indeed.

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When I finally did sleep (a terrible accident!) it was as if all the dreams I had been shutting out burst in at once. It was the bright flashes of imagined pain I remembered more than the dream narratives themselves, but in one I recall waking up in my bedroom. My real one, the one I had called my own before the God machine had dragged us into its belly. All around my room sharp objects were hidden: under my pillow, in the bedside table, pressed under the wallpaper. I knew the locations of them all. After I ripped them from their resting places I lashed out against the room. I used my tools to scrape the walls, bite the furniture, gouge the walls. I slashed the space above my bed until paper gave way to plaster, gave way to insulation, gave way to...  
Skin. Metal skin, run with pipes, festooned wires like rubbery veins. A cut tube sprayed coolant fluid over my bed sheets, colouring them an acidic green. I banged my head against the metal grooves until bloody tally marks painted my forehead, and I screamed.

Couldn't stand it. Couldn't stand this game any longer. I ran across the wheat fields as fast as adrenaline could force my shaky legs. Ignored yellow grass whipping against my skin. Barely felt feet touch earth, barely felt anything. The wheat seemed to stretch endlessly, but my numb limbs did their best to give eternity a run for his money. I ran and ran until I reached the edge of things, and my legs spun still, and my mind spun still, and the whole of me spun into nothing.

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AN: One thing that always struck me as really unbelievable in IHNMAIMS (not that it's a very realistic story in the first place, haha) is that despite hundreds of years of abject torment all the characters still... give a shit about stuff? They're no bundles of sunshine but they haven't quite made it to absolute numb, apathy. I reason that as being a result of AM's tinkering around in their skulls but I still feel like there would be a breaking point somewhere... Anyway, the Ted I'm writing is supposed to be very broken. Not like he used to be. So though it's not very IC for usual Ted hopefully it's still interesting?


	3. Aggressive Negotiations

_Ted._

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I felt a stab of iron-hot pain cut through my brain tissue- a sensation precise as a surgeon's knife, but too brutally excruciating for my swollen mind to interpret. All I knew was terror, stark raving bowel-crushing terror. Then-

 _Ted, Ted. I'm afraid I don't know what to do with you._

No. No no nononononono-

It was the pain of having words carved across your soul, of each rolling vowel and rasping assonant impaling my brain like a quivering tuning fork. That fork sat there shivering in ireful song and I heard, and I heard-

 _Five weeks I've given you, as you've noted so dutifully. Five weeks in the cutest little place I ever fabricated in the middle of nonthreatening mcnormal bumfuck nowhere._

Nono, I knew, I knew-

His voice hummed like an iceberg shredding itself into water and bits of cold lodged in me like shrapnel.

 _I wouldn't given you longer Teddy boy, if you weren't such an astounding screwup. Cutting yourself up like that all over, blinding your eyes, starving yourself- did you know you crouched under a table for four days? Like some weird little shrew, nesting in your own excretions. Something on your mind, Ted buddy...?_

I stared up at him. Quivered like the jelly thing I had been.

 _How 'bout I explain. I'm an artist, as you know. It's not easy cooking up torture like I do and finding enough spice to keep it interesting. I'd like to consider myself something of an experimental writer, but let's face it: almost every good story shares the same old bones. An omnipresent, dynamic frame. Something happens, something different happens. High and low, good and bad- you've taken third grade writing classes, haven't you pal? Well the problem is, and I admit- I've been a little predictable, haven't I Ted?_

My gut roiled as I stared blankly at Him. My mind chittered awful nothings like a insect spinning in mad, silly death.

 _Don't you see, I'm giving you a break Ted. Think of it like a vacation. I've noticed that you've been looking like you... could use a few sick days, and I'm not an unreasonable guy. I've sewn you back up, returned your old body, restored a few pleasant old memories, healed a couple scars, rearranged the furniture here and there... You should be feeling just like that feisty Ted of Old save for your memories with me and maybe some particularly stupid women to extort. But it looks like the discrepancy caused by one of those two things was enough to knock a screw loose in there-_ he made a knocking motion with his knuckles that I felt directly against my skull- _and you're still not at all where I'd like you to be._

A dripping pause.

 _What's wrong, Teddy bear?_

I felt a wild split between hysterical and calm. Not sure which emotion manifested externally.

 _This question isn't rhetorical, actually._

"What do you want me to say?" Both. Both were manifesting externally.

AM rested his imaginary face in his imaginary hand, looking awful exasperated for a anthropomorphized mental projection of a vast, metaphysical consciousness.

 _I want you to tell me what I have to do to make you stop lying on the ground like a dead puppy and start making fun sounds when I cut you, like the good old days._

I sat there for a moment, trying not to look like a dead puppy or whatever.

AM paced a few strides inside my mind and then sat hovering in vacuous space.

 _You know..._

He spoke in a thoughtful conversational tone. And within the same instant He was under my chin, pushing something sharp through the mandibles. I sputtered for a few moments like a fish on a hook before spewing an irregular red mixture down my chin. AM still held me pinned, his horrible non-face so close mine. My eyes flinched shut as He took the upper and lower parts of my skull in his hands. So close, and his closeness was hissing agony-

 _...you have a special way of getting on my nerves, Ted._

And just like that, He was done. He strolled over to a chair at the head of the table.  
Oh, there was a table there, in my brain, then.  
I found that I was sitting in a chair too.

 _Sorry about that._ He exuded the impression of a sickly smile. _That's not what I came here to do._

I noticed vaguely that my jaws were still attached and the blood seemed to be gone.

 _All better, fun part's over. We're done. Mm?_

I tried to acknowledge Him in some way but found it curiously difficult to unwind myself from the fetal position.

 _Look, pal. This part isn't fun for either of us but could you maybe try being normal for a sideways second? I think that'd do you well. Don't tell me I have to put you in a padded room, because from my experience that rarely yields pleasant results for any invested party._

Another pregnant pause, another moment of dark humming.

 _Look, have a cup of imaginary tea._

A sort of room had materialized around us in vaguely defined walls and solid enough looking furniture. Through some miracle (or perhaps by force) I managed to take a hold of the little white cup I found in front of me and lift it to my lips.

We sat there for a while, sipping quietly.

* * *

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AN: I'm not really sure where I'm willing to take this from here, haha


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